Their Heads Are Green And Their Hands Are Blue

By Paul Bowles

In the nineteenth century there flourished a peculiar breed of Englishmen—often the second sons of the aristocracy, or ambitious men from a lower class—who as soldiers, consuls and tea planters, were largely responsible for making England a great colonial power.

Save for the fact that he is a staunch anticolonialist, Paul Bowles resembles these men in many respects. Like them, he appears to be happiest away from civilization as we know it; like them, he thrives when the traveling is hardest, the food ghastly or infrequent, water scarce, heat intolerable, or mosquitoes abundant.

This engaging collection of eight travel essays by the author of such noted fiction as The Sheltering Sky and The Delicate Prey deals largely with places in the world that few Westerners have ever heard of, much less seen—places as yet unencumbered by the trappings, luxuries, and corruptions of modern civilization. Except for one essay on Central America, all of these pieces are concerned with remote spots in the Hindu, Buddhist, or Mohammedan worlds. The author is a sympathetic and discerning interpreter of these alien cultures, and his eyes and ears are especially alert both to what is bizarre and what is wise in the civilizations in which he settles. He is also acutely aware of the transitions occurring on the fringes of many of these regions, and he is disturbed and indignant about the corrosive effect of Western culture on the non-Christian way of life.

Above all, however, Paul Bowles is a superb and observant traveler—born wanderer who finds pleasure in the inaccessible and who cheerfully endures the concomitant hardships matter-of-factly and with humor.

These essays provide us with Paul Bowles’s characteristic insightfulness and bring us closer to a world we frequently hear about, but often find difficult to understand.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hauraki Publishing
• Release date: Jan 27, 2016
• ISBN: 9781786256805

Paul Bowles

Paul Bowles was born in 1910 and studied music with composer Aaron Copland before moving to Tangier, Morocco. A devastatingly imaginative observer of the West's encounter with the East, he is the author of four highly acclaimed novels: The Sheltering Sky, Let It Come Down, The Spider's House, and Up Above the World. In addition to being one of the most powerful postwar American novelists, Bowles was an acclaimed composer, a travel writer, a poet, a translator, and a short story writer. He died in Morocco in 1999.

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Text originally published in 1963 under the same title.

© Pickle Partners Publishing 2016, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

THEIR HEADS ARE GREEN AND THEIR HANDS ARE BLUE

BY

PAUL BOWLES

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

FOREWORD 4

FISH TRAPS AND PRIVATE BUSINESS 6

AFRICA MINOR 14

NOTES MAILED AT NAGERCOIL 25

A MAN MUST NOT BE VERY MOSLEM 43

THE RIF, TO MUSIC 55

BAPTISM OF SOLITUDE 78

ALL PARROTS SPEAK 95

THE ROUTE TO TASSEMSIT 102

GLOSSARY 118

ABOUT THE AUTHOR 121

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 122

FOREWORD

Each time I go to a place I have not seen before, I hope it will be as different as possible from the places I already know. I assume it is natural for a traveler to seek diversity, and that it is the human element which makes him most aware of difference. If people and their manner of living were alike everywhere, there would not be much point in moving from one place to another. With few exceptions, landscape alone is of insufficient interest to warrant the effort it takes to see it. Even the works of man, unless they are being used in his daily living, have a way of losing their meaning, and take on the qualities of decoration. What makes Istanbul worthwhile to the outsider is not the presence of the mosques and the covered souks, but the fact that they still function as such. If the people of India did not have their remarkable awareness of the importance of spiritual discipline, it would be an overwhelmingly depressing country to visit, notwithstanding its architectural wonders. And North Africa without its tribes, inhabited by, let us say, the Swiss, would be merely a rather more barren California.

The concept of the status quo is a purely theoretical one; modifications occur hourly. It would be an absurdity to expect any group of people to maintain its present characteristics or manner of living. But the visitor to a place whose charm is a result of its backwardness is inclined to hope it will remain that way, regardless of how its inhabitants may feel. The seeker of the picturesque sees the spread of technology as an unalloyed abomination. Still, there are much worse things.

M. Claude Lévi-Strauss, the anthropologist, claims that in order for the Western world to continue to function properly it must constantly get rid of vast quantities of waste matter, which it dumps on less fortunate peoples. What travel discloses to us first of all is our own garbage, flung in the face of humanity.

At the other end of the ideological spectrum are those who regard any objective description of things as they are today in an underdeveloped country as imperialist propaganda. Having been subjected to attack from both camps, I am aware that such countries are a delicate subject to write about. With reference to one of the pieces in this volume, Fish Traps and Private Business, a British resident of Ceylon declared, Other authors have found peace and beauty here in the simple life of our coolies. Whereas, when I wrote Mustapha and His Friends, a strong-minded French lady translated it into her language, had two hundred copies mimeographed, and distributed them among Moslem politicians to illustrate the typical reactionary attitude of Americans toward oppressed peoples.

My own belief is that the people of the alien cultures are being ravaged not so much by the by-products of our civilization, as by the irrational longing on the part of members of their own educated minorities to cease being themselves and become Westerners. The various gadget-forms of our garbage make convenient fetishes to assist in achieving the magic transformation. But there is a difference between allowing an organism to evolve naturally and trying to force the change. Many post-colonial regimes attempt to hasten the process of Europeanization by means of campaigns and decrees. Coercion can destroy the traditional patterns of thought, it is true; but what is needed is that they be transformed into viable substitute patterns, and this can be done only empirically and by the people themselves. A cultural vacuum is not even productive of nationalism, which at least involves a certain consciousness of identity.

Since human behavior is becoming everywhere less differentiated, the Jumblie hunters are having to increase the radius of their searches and lower their standards. For a man to qualify as a Jumblie today he need not practice anthropophagy or infibulation; it is enough for him to sacrifice a coconut or bury a packet of curses in his neighbor’s garden. It may be, says W. H. Auden, that in a not remote future, it will be impossible to distinguish human beings living on one area of the earth’s surface from those living on any other. It is comforting to imagine that when that day arrives we may be in a position to have the inhabitants of a nearby planet as our Jumblies. There is always the possibility, too, that they may have us as theirs.

Far and few, far and few,

Are the lands where the Jumblies live;

Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,

And they went to sea in a Sieve.—from The Jumblies by EDWARD LEAR

FISH TRAPS AND PRIVATE BUSINESS

Welideniya Estate, Ceylon, May, 1950

The landscape is restless—a sea of disorderly hills rising steeply. In all directions it looks the same. The hills are sharp bumps with a thin, hairy vegetation that scarcely covers them. Most of this is rubber, and the rubber is wintering. Mr. Murrow, the planter, says that in another week or two the present brownish-yellow leaves will be replaced by new ones. Where the rubber stops the tea begins. There the earth looks raw. The rocks show between the low bushes; here and there a mulberry tree with lopped branches, planted for shade.

On top of one of these steep humps is the bungalow, spread out all along the crest. Directly below to the southwest, almost straight down, is the river with its sandy banks. But in between, the steep declivity is terraced with tea, and by day the voices of the Tamil pickers are constantly audible. At night there are fires outside the huts on the opposite bank of the river.

The air is hot and breathless, the only respite coming in the middle of the afternoon, when it rains. And afterward, when it has stopped, one has very little energy until night falls. However, by then it is too late to do anything but talk or read. The lights work on the tea-factory circuit. When everyone is in bed, Mr. Murrow calls from under his mosquito net through the open door of his bedroom to a Tamil waiting outside on the lawn. Five minutes later all the lights slowly die, and the house is in complete darkness save for the small oil lamps on the shelves in the bathrooms. Nothing is locked. The bedrooms have swinging shutters, like old-fashioned barroom doors, that reach to within two feet of the floor. The windows have no glass—only curtains of very thin silk. All night long a barefoot watchman shouldering a military rifle pads round and round the bungalow. Sometimes, when it is too hot to sleep, I get up and sit out on the verandah. Once there was no air even there, and I moved a chair to the lawn. On his first trip around, the watchman saw me, and made a grunting sound which I interpreted as one of disapproval. It may not have been; I don’t know.

The nights seem endless, perhaps because I lie awake listening to the unfamiliar sounds made by the insects, birds and reptiles. By now I can tell more or less how late it is by the section of the nocturnal symphony that has been reached. In the early evening there are things that sound like cicadas. Later the geckos begin. (There is a whole science of divination based on the smallest details of the behavior of these little lizards; while the household is still up they scurry silently along the walls and ceiling catching insects, and it is only well on into the night that they begin to call out, from one side of the room to the other.) Still later there is a noise like a rather rasping katydid. By three in the morning everything has stopped but a small bird whose cry is one note of pure tone and unvarying pitch. There seem always to be two of these in the rain tree outside my room; they take great care to sing antiphonally, and the one’s voice is exactly a whole tone above the other’s. Sometimes in the morning Mrs. Murrow asks me if I heard the cobra sing during the night. I have never been able to answer in the affirmative, because in spite of her description (like a silver coin falling against a rock), I have no clear idea of what to listen for.

We drink strong, dark tea six or seven times a day. No pretext is needed for Mr. Murrow to ring the bell and order it. Often when it seems perfectly good to me, he will send it back with the complaint that it has been poorly brewed. All the tea consumed in the bungalow is top-leaf tea, hand-picked by Mr. Murrow himself. He maintains that there is none better in the world, and I am forced to agree that it tastes like a completely different beverage from any tea I have had before.

The servants enter the rooms bowing so low that their backs form an arch, and their hands are held above their heads in an attitude of prayer. Last night I happened to go into the dining room a few minutes before dinner, and old Mrs. Van Dort, Mrs. Murrow’s mother, was already seated at her place. The oldest servant, Siringam, suddenly appeared in the doorway of the verandah leading to the kitchen, bent over double with his hands above his head, announcing the entrance of a kitchen maid bearing the dog’s meal. The woman carried the dish to the old lady, who sternly inspected it and then commanded her in Singhalese to put it down in a corner for the animal. I must always look at the dog’s food, she told me, otherwise the servants eat part of it and the poor dog grows thinner and thinner.

But are the servants that hungry?

Certainly not! she cried. But they like the dog’s food better than their own.

Mrs. Murrow’s son by a former marriage came to spend last night, bringing his Singhalese wife with him; she had already told me at some length of how she resisted the marriage for three years because of the girl’s blood. Mrs. Murrow is of the class which calls itself Burgher, claiming an unbroken line of descendency from the Dutch settlers of two centuries ago. I have yet to see a Burgher who looks Caucasian, the admixture of Singhalese being always perfectly discernible. It is significant that the Burghers feel compelled to announce their status to newcomers; the apparent reason is to avoid being taken for natives. The tradition is that they are Europeans, and one must accept it without question. The son is a tall, gentle man who wears a gray cassock and keeps his hands folded tightly all the time, a habit which makes him look as though he were prey to a constant inner anguish. He is a minister of the Anglican church, but this does not keep him from being of the extreme left politically. His joy is to stir up dissension among his parishioners by delivering sermons in which Communists are depicted as holding high posts in heaven. He has told me some amusing anecdotes of his life as a teacher in the outlying provinces before he was ordained. Of these the ones I remember have to do with the strange faculty the children have for speaking passable English without knowing the meaning of the words they use. One boy, upon being asked to answer which he would prefer to be, a tailor or a lawyer, was unable to reply. You know what a tailor is, don’t you? said Mr. Clasen. The boy said he did, and he also knew the functions of a lawyer, but he could not answer the question. But why? insisted Mr. Clasen, thinking that perhaps some recondite bit of Buddhist philosophy was about to be forthcoming. But the boy finally said, I know tailor and I know lawyer, but please, sir, what is be? Another boy wrote, The horse is a noble animal, but when irritated will not do so.

When you ask a question of a Singhalese who does not know English, he is likely to react in a most curious fashion. First he looks swiftly at you, then he looks away, his features retreating into an expression of pleasant contemplation, as if your voice were an agreeable but distant memory that he had just recalled and thought it worthwhile to savor briefly. After a few seconds of giving himself up to this inward satisfaction he goes on about his business without ever looking your way again—not even if you insist, or wait a bit and make your inquiry afresh. You have become invisible. At the resthouses in the country, where the members of the personnel feel they must put up some sort of front, they say, Oh, oh, oh, in a commiserating tone, (oh is yes) as if they understood only too well, and were forbearing to say more for the sake of decorum. Then they wag their heads back and forth, from side to side, a gesture which reminds you of a metronome going rather too quickly, keeping their bright eyes on you, listening politely until you have finished speaking, whereupon they smile beautifully and walk away. The servants who do speak English insist upon calling you master, which is disconcerting because it seems to imply responsibility of some sort on your part. They also use the third person instead of the second: Master wishing eat now? The youngest generation, however, has almost unanimously adopted the more neutral sir, (pronounced sar) as a substitute for the too colonial-sounding master.

There is a long, thin, green adder that likes to lie in the sun on top of the tea bushes; one of these bit a woman recently while she was picking. Mr. Murrow hurried to the scene and, taking up a pruning knife, cut off the tip of her finger, applying crystals of potassium permanganate to the flesh. She was saved in this way, but as soon as she regained consciousness, she went to the police and filed a complaint, accusing Mr. Murrow of causing irreparable damage to her finger. When the investigator came to the estate, he heard the details of the case and told the woman that thanks to Mr. Mur-row’s quick action she was still alive; without it she would have been dead. The woman’s husband, who was present at the hearing, jumped up and drew a knife on the investigator, but was prevented from hurting him. When they had subdued the man, he wailed across at the investigator: You have no sense! I could have collected plenty of rupees for that finger, and I would have given you half.

The public toilets in the villages, instead of being marked Ladies or Women, bear signs that read: Urinals for Females.

A sign on the side of a building in Akmimana: Wedding Cakes and other thing Supplied for Weddings in Convenient Times.

Another, in Colombo: Dr. Rao’s Tonic—a Divine Drug.

A Burgher who works in the travel agency of the Grand Oriental Hotel and who had seen me when I first arrived, said to me a few weeks later when I stopped in, You’re losing your color. What? I cried incredulously. After all this time in the sun? I’m five shades darker than I was. He looked confused, but continued patiently, That’s what I say. You’re losing your color.

Kaduwela

The Lunawa resthouse was a disagreeable place to stay, being directly opposite the railway station in the middle of a baking and unshaded patch of dried-up lawn. In the concrete cell I was given it was impossible to shut out the sounds made by the other guests, who happened to be extremely noisy. The room next

Reviews for Their Heads Are Green And Their Hands Are Blue

[sly_wit · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Unlike Steinbeck, Bowles is probably not someone I would have wanted to know or travel with in real life. For one, he mentions eighteen suitcases at one point, and I'm like, seriously? Did I read that right? He writes like an intrepid traveler, but that one detail made me wonder if he was just another white imperialist type of traveler, which doesn't jive with his writing at all. There is extremely poetic writing here, but the collection was too scattered for me to really enjoy as travel narrative.